Synchronous optical network (SONET) is an interface standard for transporting digital signals over fiber optical links that allows interworking of transmission products from multiple vendors. In SONET, data is transported in synchronous frames each having a number of defined channels. Network users, or customers, are assigned one or more of the channels. Customers may combine their channels to form a single, relatively high capacity connection, combine some of the channels to form several higher capacity connections or may independently use each channel as a discrete connection.
After a customer has determined its mix of channels into connections, the network provider provisions each node of the SONET network to provide cross-connects for the mix. This effort is tedious, time-consuming and subject to errors. This is especially true when the customer frequently changes its traffic mix, which requires the network provider to change provisioning of the SONET nodes along the transmission path of the connections.
Tandem Connection Management was developed within the SONET standard to alleviate this problem. Tandem Management Connection, however, is complex and utilizes optical overhead information not regularly used by customers or network providers. Accordingly, it is not generally implementable across network boundaries.